Top 10 Stories

The European Commission wants to take the anonymity away from virtual currencies by demanding users register on a database so they can be tracked. The proposal would provide the EU with a record containing the real-world identities of people using cryptocurrencies as well as the addresses of the virtual wallets where their money is held. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: International Business Times

A former employee of Citibank has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for crippling the bank's internal network. Lennon Ray Brown was given the nearly two-year jail term – along with a $77,000 fine – by a Northern Texas District Court this week after he pleaded guilty to one count of intentional damage to a computer. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Register

Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) has become a very popular business model over the past several months, and the actor(s) behind Petya and Mischa ransomware families have adopted the service model. After testing the RaaS model with a limited amount of high volume distributors, the Petya and Mischa operators have decided to make the service publicly available. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Security Week

In the latest of a series of implausibly appalling statements, Republican presidential nightmare Donald Trump encouraged the Russian government to hack into the servers of US government officials in order to provide him political ammunition against his Democratic rival. Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Trump said: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."...

Siemens has released software updates for several of its industrial automation products to address medium and high severity vulnerabilities discovered by researchers from various companies. View full story ORIGINAL SOURCE: Security Week

Researchers at Arbor Networks, the security division of Netscout, recently managed to crack the heavy obfuscated domain generation algorithm (DGA) of Mad Max, a targeted Trojan that has created a botnet of infected machines in sixteen countries. The malware itself hasn’t been detailed as of now, but researchers did manage to find all of the domains that the threat has connected to since the beginning of 2015, as well as those it is supposed to...

Though we in tech-savvy circles have been talking about the Internet of Things for years now, connected device ecosystems are still a relatively young area, with security standards not universally acknowledged or even set. The Osram Lightify Smart Light Bulb system (seen as an affordable alternative to Philips Hue) is one such range that could potentially fall foul of a hack attack – it's been singled out as being particularly vulnerable to hackers.   Original...

President Obama on Tuesday published a long-awaited directive clarifying how the federal government should respond to a cyber attack. The directive issues a set of principles for guiding the federal response and lays out which government agencies would be responsible in the event of a "significant cyber incident," which is broadly defined as an attack likely to result in demonstrable harm to national security interests, foreign relations, the US economy, public confidence, civil liberties or...

A dangerous zero-day vulnerability has been found in popular cloud password vault LastPass, which The Register has been told can completely compromise user accounts. Many millions of users can right now be compromised by merely visiting a malicious website, we understand. This allows attackers complete access to user accounts in which hundreds and thousands of passwords are stored.   Original Source: The Register View the full story here

Information typed on a wireless keyboard can be easily intercepted, a cybersecurity research firm has warned. San Francisco-based Bastille said keyboards transmitted what was being typed in "clear text", making it possible for attackers to listen in on from up to 76m (250ft) away. The firm said affected keyboards could not be updated and should be replaced. View full story Original source: BBC News